


You Let Go, and I'll Let Go Too

by Pozoe12



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:28:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24686893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pozoe12/pseuds/Pozoe12
Summary: A retelling of the last scene in the Season 3 finale. I took some creative liberties and changed a few things, but for the most part it's pretty word-for-word. That scene almost killed me, and I couldn't get it out of my head so here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Season 3 spoilers, obviously!
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	You Let Go, and I'll Let Go Too

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Ex-Factor" by Lauryn Hill

She finds you on the bridge.

It feels inevitable, really, like everything was always going to lead to this. Like you’ve just been waiting for this moment, and everything leading to the right here, right now, was just passing the time.

“Eve.” Your name falls quietly from her mouth, dripping in that throaty Russian accent you’ve never quite gotten over. Almost tender, in a way you’ve never heard from her.

Your body feels heavy, like the entire weight of a year spent chasing a murderer, of losing a husband, a life, and your sanity is finally now weighing down on you. Inescapable. Inevitable. It was always going to be like this.

You remember Dasha, remember who you became in that moment, who you’ve _become_ in these past several months, who you are now.

“I killed her, you know.”

“Who?” She looks at you, quirks an eyebrow, the immaculate arch of it never failing to send something down your spine that you ignore. Keep ignoring, ignore, ignore, _ignore,_ until it goes away. You’re tired. You don’t want to keep fighting.

“Dasha. I killed Dasha.”

“No, _I_ killed Dasha,” she says, matter-of-factly, rolling her eyes in that annoyingly charming way. “I hit her over the head with a golf club.” The words roll off her tongue, the sound of her voice so familiar now. That _accent._ She looks back out over the river, the city lights sprinkling over the rolling darkness so beautifully. Your heart hurts.

How did you get here? A heart-to-heart with the only cold-blooded killer you’ve ever known, let alone obsessed over.

You turn to face her, look her dead in the eyes. She needs to know, and she needs to watch you say it, watch the words spill out your mouth. Needs to see the way she’s absolutely snatched the humanity from your breath, your chest eking out the remains of a soul that once was. A child, getting the wind knocked out of her. A dying woman, her last breath falling from her lips.

“I crushed her. With my _foot_.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh.”

Silence. Her face contorting in that maddeningly expressive way of hers. And then, with just the slightest glimmer of surprise, she concedes. “Then I guess we both did.” Brow furrowed, she looks back out onto the water, and if you didn’t know better, you’d almost think she looked troubled. “Isn’t that romantic.”

You scoff then, the utter absurdity of it all slamming down on you like God himself yelling in your face for some sense, just a little bit of _reason_ , good _God,_ woman. 

“You know who the only people who would think that are?” Your tone is biting, though you didn’t mean it.

She looks you right in the eye, then pauses for the dramatic effect that you know runs through her veins, that she can’t help herself from. It’s like scolding a dog for chasing after small animals.

“Who?” Her eyes roll to the sky as she says it, primly, the absolute show of it boiling something in your blood that you can’t identify. It scares you, the things she makes you feel. You can’t put a name to it. You don’t know what you would do if you tried.

“Us.” _Duh._ You break eye contact again; it’s too much.

Quiet moments pass, and you wonder if you will ever feel normal again. If the monotony of everyday life, of waking up to fresh-brewed coffee, of commuting to your 9-5, of slow-simmered pot roasts and too much red wine on the weekends will ever be enough for you again. If it ever was.

Her voice interrupts your thoughts, and it’s like she knows what you’re thinking, or she’s on the same wavelength, or the same page of your book, or _something_ when she says, “I don’t want to do it anymore.” She pauses. “Any of it.”

You watch her face when she speaks— can’t help yourself, those high cheekbones biting into the delicate features of her face. Loose strands of soft, honey blonde fly across her skin in the wind. You dig your fingers into your palm at the first itching to press the silky hairs back behind her ear. _Please, God, no. Not today, not ever. Please._ You try to remember how you got here. All those deaths _._ _I’ve killed so many people, Eve._ Her voice echoes in your mind, and you try to forget the way those words felt whispered against your hair. The understanding that passed between the two of you, the relief of knowing one another. Of knowing her, and of her knowing you. Unconditional. The things people write great classics about, and start wars over. Falling into your lap so easily, so effortlessly. As if loving someone so dangerous, so irredeemable, so wholly unlovable could ever be easy. 

“What’s happened to us?” You’re thinking out loud, you realize, but then you don’t care. She needs to hear this too. Mutual suffering. It’s what your entire relationship is built on, you think. You spin around to look at the world passing you by, the cars, the buses, the brisk-walking commuters. The sound of life, of people _with_ lives. With husbands and wives and mothers and families, and real, _genuine_ friendship. The stuff life is made of. The only reason worth living, probably. Everything you don’t have— have _lost_ , that is.

“I had a life. I had a husband, and a house, a chicken.” You try to keep your tone even, cursing yourself as it rises into hysterics despite yourself. Even through the bitter taste of anger in your mouth, you can feel how wrong the words feel, how misaligned they are with the panicked rhythm your heart is beating out.

“You still want that stuff?” Her face is knowing, teetering on the edge of condescending, but the anger fizzles straight out of you. Maybe a normal person who hadn’t spent the past 17 months counting this woman’s every breath wouldn’t have heard the question behind her tone, the words desperately begging to be asked, to be seen. _Do you want me?_ But you hear it.

And then, the truth. Your voice cracking, eyes stinging. “When I try and think of my future, I just… see your face over and over again.” Your heart breaks in half; you can feel it crack. Heavy and hard. Inevitable. _This was inevitable_. You hear Carolyn’s voice echo in your mind, and you realize she was right— just about the wrong thing. Konstantin wasn’t inevitable— _this_ was, _she_ was, is, always will be.

“It’s a very beautiful face.” Her grin is fleeting, quickly fades into a little head shake to herself, as if dislodging her own joke, knowing she can’t hide forever. Knowing the facade won’t last forever. “Did I ruin your life?” When you don’t answer, don’t know how you could ever possibly answer that, she continues. “Do you think I’m a monster?”

The word sinks hard like a pit in your stomach. _Monster_. And you realize, with a sinking feeling, that in all these months of your fascination with heinous murders and all the many ways in which a person could so cleanly execute such a horrific crime— not once had the word _monster_ occurred to you. Self-absorbed, narcissistic, pain-in-the-ass psycho? Sure. But something so utterly, blatantly _low_ as monster had never so much as crossed your mind.

You don’t have time to wonder what that means.

“You’re so many things,” you say, slowly, not realizing where your words are taking you until they come out of your mouth.

“Doesn’t answer my question,” she breathes, with that little quirk of her lips that you have nightmares about —or are they really daydreams?— and you can see the thinly veiled nervousness, or pain, or _something_ , something deeply vulnerable hidden beneath her smirk.

“I think we all have monsters inside of us,” you continue, and you know it’s true even as you say it. “It’s just that most people manage to keep theirs hidden.”

“Well, _I_ haven’t,” she says, and you hate, _hate_ that the word _adorable_ is what comes to mind when you see her eyebrows crinkle, childlike, emphasizing her words. 

“No,” you scoff. And then: “Neither have I.”

“I think my monster encourages your monster…right?”

“I think I wanted it to.” This is more truth than you ever intended, more painfully brutal honesty than you were ever prepared for, probably something that should have been saved for a hypothetical future therapy session, and yet here you are.

The fear rises in you, wins out over everything else and the words are gushing out of you before you even know they exist. “Help me. Help me make it stop.” Your throat is hot and aching painfully, and you can’t help the tears that follow, uninvited but still cathartic.

“So no more tea dances?” She looks at you, eyebrows raised in question. It’s frustrating, really, the way she makes you laugh so effortlessly when you’re crying. Like a best friend would. Like real lovers do. More terrifying is the realization that you don’t really _have_ friends anymore. That, if you really think about it, she’s all you’ve _got._ A serial killer. Your only friend left in this world. She sobers, then continues. “If that’s really what you want, it’s not difficult.”

You look out over the ledge, and it becomes clear what she means. “You gonna tell me to jump?” you snort. Of course that’s what she’d say. What else did you expect?

“Noooo, of course not,” she says easily, dismissively. “You die if you jump.” She tilts her head over the railing at the river below, and you wonder when you’ll stop wanting to kiss her so bad. “It’s easier than that.”

“If only that were true,” you sigh, feeling dramatic and not being able to help yourself. The exhaustion is seeping into your bones and you just want to lay down, want someone to hold you while you rest. You miss the comfort of knowing you were loved. An unsatisfying love is better than no love, you think.

“Stand up straight.” You ignore her, wallowing in the misery of this life you’ve created. Any semblance of a real conversation with her is gone, and you need to start thinking of how you’re going to comfort yourself when you make it back to your bed, alone, and the world starts crashing under your feet—for real this time, crisis _not_ averted.

“Stand up straight and look at me,” she commands, and this time you do. Something in her tone has shifted, and you feel your heart start to pound, like it knows something you don’t.

“Now turn around and face the other way.”

“What?” Confusion. First, this mellow, almost _kind_ version her, a version you’ve never seen. Someone who chases after you when you go storming out of the room, and stands with you on bridges late at night just to be with you. And now, strange requests that have you standing face-to-face with her, just inches apart. The mood shifts. The air between the two of you starts to buzz with tension born from months of an endless game of cat and mouse that you just can’t quite get yourself to end. Always chasing, always following. You can feel the heat from her body, her breath falling on your face. Smell the aching way her perfume billows around her, warning her prey that she’s just around the corner. You wonder when you stopped being the prey, stopped fearing her. Or, maybe —you still do? One might even dare say that’s why you can’t quite seem to stay away.

“I’ll turn this way.” And just like that, she’s turning around, breaking the trance you’ve been locked into with her, the invisible shroud that had been built around the two of you, shielding you from the rest of the world. A moment passes and she asks, softly, “Have you turned? I can’t see you.”

You turn, reluctantly, not wanting to lose sight of her. You could lie to yourself and say that it’s for fear of what she might do to you when your back is turned, but you know it’s something deeper, something even scarier. The tension is building again, you can feel it. Somehow, this feels heavier than anything you’ve ever done together. The weight of it presses down on you, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. The back of her head presses against yours, warmly, and for a moment nothing else in the world matters. The heat, the reassuring pressure of another living, human body, another thinking mind and breathing soul pressed against yours. Someone who has seen the darkness in you, who withdrew it carefully like a thin line of silk until there was nothing else to be found. It’s too much, it’s all too much, and not enough, you want to turn around and pull her to you and—

“Now what?” You interrupt your own thoughts, willing your racing heart to slow, please, for the love of God.

“Now we walk. And we never look back.”

Panic courses through your veins, your blood running cold. This isn’t what you wanted—you don’t even know what you wanted, but it wasn’t this. You don’t know how to stop it, but you know you _have_ to. “But, I-I-”

She interrupts you coolly, her voice stern but not mean. “ _Don’t_ turn. Just walk.”

You feel her start moving away immediately, and so you start walking after a moment, a lone tear rolling down your cheek, knees weak and hands trembling. Forever? Goodbye _forever_?

You don’t even know what you would _do_ _—_ God, what would you do without her? Without her to obsess over, to entertain, to consume your every waking moment. You feel so empty, and you hate how nothing you’ve ever felt for Niko feels even _remotely_ close to this. Nothing could have prepared you.

A few more paces, and you physically cannot keep moving. Every step feels like an intentional waving of an eraser over her presence, and if you keep going there will be nothing left. You stop, shedding away any last pretense of sanity, of control. Your head turns back without your permission, and the rest of your body follows.

She’s stopped too. You almost fall over with relief when you see her, taut and strong and tall and not moving. She hasn’t turned. You think maybe God is looking down on you asking, _Is this really what you want?_ Giving you one last chance to change your mind. You’re holding your breath, watching her, waiting for her to turn. _Inevitable._ The heartbreak is inevitable, you know it, and you got it all wrong, there is inevitability, there always will be, but it wasn’t what you thought it would be, wrong, _wrong_ , just like Carolyn and—

She turns.

**Author's Note:**

> I realize I used "serial killer" instead of assassin, and technically she isn't really a serial killer, but I dunno...something about "serial killer" just hit better, what can I say


End file.
